of the city, and that is where most of the front lines lie. the military here for the most part is forced to air drop supplies to its troops that are stuck on these bases, on many occasions because of fire coming from rebel forces, those air drops miss their targets entirely. they are seeing a growing number of defections. they most certainly do feel despite the fact that it is an incredibly dangerous and very intense front line and there are multiple ones, i must say that, but they do feel that right now, they have the upper hand and while they have the upper hand, they are not going to back down because they quite simply cannot afford to lose any of the significant gains, any portion of this massive amount of territory that they have been able to capture so far. >> arwa damon inside syria for us. thank you. stay safe. >> reporter: thank you. >>> for more on this let's bring in cnn national security contributor fran townsend, also a member of the cia and homeland security external advisories boards and bob baer, former cia officer. let's go f